It's just this unfortunate thing that there's no substitute for actual awareness of actual cultural relevance You don't have to be a Christian or like Christianity to be aware that the world out there is soaking in Christian imagery, and therefore Christian symbols are potent
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It means something to a typical Western audience to show a scene from the Crucifixion that, unfortunately, does not have the same automatic sense of weight and power if you took a similar scene from a religion with a much smaller number of adherents, or from one you just invented
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And it's kind of this arch commentary on the fact that pop culture has, for better or for worse, taken the place of actual religion/mythology for a lot of people There's a limit to how meta Disney will let WandaVision get, but it is meta -- about the MCU as well as sitcoms
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They can't actually directly make fun of the MCU itself to a degree that will make the suits nervous (although they've toed the line as close as they could with the SPOILER casting and the SPOILER one-liner about it)
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But, like Sitcoms are fucking dumb We can all admit the really famous sitcoms of the past have sucked in a lot of ways, for political reasons, because of business compromising art, because of just changing values of what people like
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But they're IMPORTANT Shit even if you yourself never watched them, the knowledge that everyone around you watched them and developed a common language based on them means you can't escape their importance
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That's what WandaVision is saying from its very first moment with the cheesy I Love Lucy/Dick van Dyke intro And it's saying that about ITSELF too "You already know what this setting is And you ALSO already know who these characters are And you know they don't belong here"
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"I can fuck with your head and give you this immense feeling of discomfort just by putting characters you know belong in a blockbuster movie from 2018 into a setting you know belongs in 1961 What does that say about how deeply these media are already in your brain"
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And I dunno Even if it's not being subversive political commentary, it's powerful because of that borrowed power Vision's death *feels more real* because it's not something they just made up as backstory for this one project
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We all know that millions of people saw his death happen on the big screen in one of the highest-grossing movies of all time It feels real, it has weight, simply because of that fact Because this is a "canon" MCU production we know that undoing it is also a Big Fucking Deal
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This is the borrowed power that mainstream comics with their burden of decades of continuity ran on It is not a power that, to say the least, they have generally used responsibly, but it is a lot of power To tell the kids "Superman is finally going to DIE in this issue"
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I mean it's like my favorite moment from the CWverse doing Crisis on Infinite Earths They did the original DC Comics Death of Barry Allen and they did it the only way they really could do it, that would actually have an echo of that same power
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They'd brought back John Wesley Shipp, from the 1980s Flash TV show -- which was unceremoniously canceled after two seasons and never got an ending And they said THIS was the ending
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They played a clip from that show -- the OG Flash meeting his version of Iris in '80s 4:3 standard definition -- as a final farewell, as the John Wesley Shipp Barry Allen destroys himself in the cosmic treadmill to save his Earth-1 counterpart
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It was EXTREMELY meta This Flash has already seen everyone he loved die, seen his entire universe brought to an end, and is this incongruous relic from a world that now never was But he makes the choice to end his existence as the hero he always was
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So that this other younger version of him can live, so that a different version of his world and his loved ones can continue I mean when you explain the meta it comes off as a very melodramatic take on the simple fact that they're referencing an old TV show that got canceled
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But it's the fact that THIS WAS A REAL SHOW, and that John Wesley Shipp is a real guy who really did take the cancellation of his show and the end of his superhero career pretty hard, and they really did call him and say "We really need you for this scene in the new Flash series"
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The fact that this all really happened in the real world, that it has a meaning beyond something they just made up for backstory It's like when they called Adam West to ask him to be the Gray Ghost in Batman the Animated Series It always gets me verklempt to think about
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